Don’t Miss! Semalt Expert Shares 7 Types Of SEO Evidence

SEO practice is still young and growing. Proponents have fronted the view that SEO is a science resulting in the debate over of which SEO approach works best in all situations. There lies lots of technical evidence to the shape and form of SEO.

If SEO is a science, how does a science behave? Science relies on the fundamental assumption that the universe orderly follows rules which can be determined by observation and experimentation before any hypothesis is tested. It’s also assumed that these rules are static only changing very slowly even where there are drastic paradigm shifts. The world of SEO is structured and orderly but the rules or algorithms for SEO change almost on a daily basis. Any attempt to rely on observation here would not provide accurate results unless done over an entire calendar year.

Nik Chaykovskiy, the Senior Customer Success Manager of Semalt, examines 7 types of SEO evidence and their applicability in making SEO a mature science including:

1. Prophetic Evidence

This comes from experts who write the algorithms or codes relied upon by SEO. Their input is unique as it’s factual, and they sit atop of the SEO mountain like biblical prophets. Therefore, we must have the ability to reconcile their accurate statements as we can’t change the SEO codes ourselves. On the low end, prophetic evidence lacks vested interests and can sometimes seem cryptic.

2. Anecdotal Evidence

This is the evidence of personal user experience. All sciences begin with observation and SEO guides the changes made to websites and analyses the effect on rankings. This evidence is abundantly present and therefore easy to collect as the starting point for any scientific inquiry into SEO. On the flip side though, user experiences can be biased from one individual to another hence one experience cannot tell the whole story.

3. Wild Experimentation

All sciences are experimental. In SEO, we for a hypotheses that “adding keywords in title tag will improve rankings”, make changes on websites to test hypotheses and then measure the outcome. Forming and testing a hypothesis determines the causality of factors thus validating the process. Experimentation must be controlled still to avoid compromising existing SEO infrastructure.

4. Controlled Experimentation

In this setup, several domain names are registered and new websites built from the ground up. Alternatively, the sites are built up to a certain point after which each individual site introduces its own changes. This approach guarantees control of experiments without compromising other functions. Nevertheless, the sites created in this environment may not reflect the complexity or realities of the actual SEO environment.

5. Second-Hand Evidence

It sounds like hearsay, but in reality, all experiences and experiments were conducted in the past for legitimate sources of evidence. Some facts on SEO need not be confirmed by repeating experiments all the time. In such cases the, evidence presents reliable conclusions of scientific progress.

6. Correlational Evidencev

In large data sets, it’s hard to separate variables or experiment. In stead, you look for correlations between data sets. This helps unveil mathematical relationships, especially where multiple variables affect the same outcome. However, the correlation may not guarantee causation.

7. Large Scale Simulation

Models of an SEO universe created to test the hypothesis on a large scale. Testing these models presents insightful conclusions that lead to the improvement of the models. Achieving control here is possible since it’s sort of laboratory SEO. Still, results in the simulation are only as good as the model in use.